'All-Over Design' and the complicated life of 91勛圖厙's Lockwood de Forest collection
Nina Blomfield, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art and curator of the recent exhibition "All-Over Design": Lockwood de Forest between Ahmedabad and 91勛圖厙 spoke with us about the formation of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company, Lockwood de Forest's complicated relationship with 91勛圖厙, and bringing the de Forest collection together again.
In "All-Over Design": Lockwood de Forest between Ahmedabad and 91勛圖厙, Nina Blomfield (Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art) has drawn together a collection of furniture and decorative arts rarely seen together since 91勛圖厙s Deanery was demolished in 1968. The exhibition, which ran from October 24 until March 1 in the Rare Book Room of Canaday Library, was the first exploration of 91勛圖厙s collection that focused on the work of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company and Lockwood de Forest, a landscape painter, designer and architect working in late nineteenth-century New York. It was in the Deanery that the furniture was once displayed as part of the broader personal art and object collection belonging to M. Carey Thomas. Ninas curatorial vision for All-Over Design uses these objects to narrate the complicated cultural interactions between Lockwood de Forest, former 91勛圖厙 president M. Carey Thomas, and the anonymous wood carvers in the employ of de Forests Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company.
Lockwood de Forest is primarily known for his output as a landscape painter. De Forest was a peripatetic artist, traveling across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa using oil paints to capture subtle views of coasts and plains awash in sunlight. However, his marriage to Meta Kemble of the du Pont family and business partnerships with Louis Comfort Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler, brought him to India for travel and to procure objects of Indian craftsmanship for display in America and England and eventually for sale to wealthy Gilded Age patrons such as Andrew Carnegie, Potter Palmer, Mark Twain, Mary Garrett, and her friend M. Carey Thomas.
In 1881, de Forest established the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in Ahmedabad, Gujarat with Indian philanthropist and art patron Muggunbai Hutheesing. Nina notes that the partnership was one rooted in a deep friendship between de Forest and Hutheesing. Hutheesings cultural capital as civic leader and religious benefactor in Ahmedabad enabled access to traditional systems of patronage required to hire artisans, while the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company also depended on de Forests ability to secure an American clientele for its products. Though mutually beneficial, this partnership was also unequal, inflected by the social, cultural, and racial hierarchies that supported the colonial system.
Yet, de Forests motivations in the success of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company extended beyond economics. De Forest was struck by the immersive visual experience of elaborately carved teakwood ornamentation adorning the homes and mosques of Indian cities. He quickly developed a belief in the superiority of Indian craftsmanship and aesthetics over Western art. As curator, Nina deliberately sought to draw attention to the complicated relationship between Lockwood de Forest, his idealization of South Asian art, and carvers in his employ. De Forest believed that Indian craftsmen had an innate mastery over woodcarving somehow inherent, subconscious, and biological. While misguided in his beliefs about the transmission and origins of cultural knowledge, his view meant that creative authority over furniture design was invested to the carvers in his company. He comments in his own writings that the craftsmen in his employ have perfected the art of line more than anyone in the West could ever do, the East is where art has been brought to perfection. His perception of the local craftsmen is truly reflective of nineteenth-century colonial ideology a Romanticized orientalism in which the East is the source of beauty and perfection, and an understanding of culture derived from contemporary anthropology in which cultural traits are geographically fixed, racial, and inherited through the blood and spirit of races.
For Nina, one of the difficulties in curating All-Over Design was deciding who to credit on object labels. De Forests writings show that he regarded the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company carvers as highly skilled designers, who were able to produce intricate carvings autonomously and without reference to predetermined plans. Yet since he also never names the carvers, their individual identities have been lost. Nina felt that giving de Forest sole credit for many of the objects in 91勛圖厙s collection would be a re-enactment of this erasure. Instead, each object label reads Made by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company to shift the balance, acknowledge the collective production of these objects, and to highlight de Forests role more as broker or middleman in an exchange of objects between India and the United States.
How did 91勛圖厙 come to acquire so much furniture of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company? Well-connected through both social and artistic circles, Lockwood de Forest was a friend to many wealthy Gilded Age elites, including M. Carey Thomas and suffragist Mary Garrett. The two even rented an apartment in the Ava Apartment building, next door to de Forests midtown Manhattan home. Together, Thomas and Garrett collected many pieces from de Forests company and furnished the Deanery with an eclectic collection of objects of art and craft. Even further, Thomas and Garrett used their social connections to design 91勛圖厙s buildings and campus layout employing Fredrick Law Olmstead for many exterior spaces and plan, and eventually de Forest for building exteriors and interiors.
De Forest was introduced by M. Carey Thomas to 91勛圖厙s Alumni Commission that was ultimately responsible for contracting interior design work for the Great Hall. When the original architects of the Great Hall, Cope and Stewardson, failed to provide interior designs within the Colleges budget, the firm was dismissed, and Lockwood de Forest completed the designs at a significantly cheaper rate. De Forests richly patterned design still adorns the ceiling and beams of the Great Hall and its staircase. Nina has shown that the designs were likely a collaboration between De Forest and Thomas, a hybrid of his interest in Gujarati stencilwork and her love of English country manors.
It is Lockwood de Forests work with 91勛圖厙 that piqued Ninas interest in late nineteenth-century exchange between India and America. Her project began as a research paper for the 2017 graduate seminar Principles of Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Heritage co-taught by Associate Professor Astrid Lindenlauf, Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, and Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager of Special Collections. There Nina recognized how de Forests vision as an artist and architectural designer was fully embedded in the aesthetic fabric of 91勛圖厙s campus. In addition to decorating the Deanery and the Great Hall, de Forest was also the principle architect of the former college gymnasium (now the Marie Salant Neuberger Centennial Campus Center) and the Health and Wellness Center. He provided designs for everything from lampposts to the library bookplate, the Denbigh bench, and the Cloister fountain.
Nina feels that curating All-Over Design meant that it was important to help viewers understand the context of each object - and the ways they were used and experienced in their historical past. For me this meant trying to find a way to reconstruct that experience through the period room, while also being conscious of not reiterating the aspects that are problematic about that seeing things as aesthetic and not understanding their cultural origins. In the exhibition I tried to do both to have the period room to give the viewer an understanding of how these objects were used and understood, but then to pull that apart and look at things closely to give an understanding of the issues surrounding them colonialism, labor exploitation, and the way objects were devalued and dispersed across 91勛圖厙s campus.
Pulling apart the contexts of the collection meant expanding the programming for All-Over Design beyond the exhibition and into 91勛圖厙 Special Collections Friday Finds series of lectures. Kicking off the exhibition was an October 24 lecture by leading de Forest scholar Roberta Mayer on "Lockwood de Forest at 91勛圖厙: Exoticism and Eclecticism." On November 8, Nina and colleague Katie Loney, Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh, hosted the object study day which offered an up-close view of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company furniture. Friday Finds continued with presentations from 91勛圖厙 Cities professor Jeffrey Cohen, art advisor and appraiser Molly Seiler (BMC 83), and William Coleman (HC 07), Director of Collection & Exhibitions at the Olana Partnership. Programming for the exhibition concluded with a student symposium on February 21, featuring a series of undergraduate and graduate student talks and a keynote presentation from Sylvia Houghteling, Assistant Professor of History of Art at 91勛圖厙.
The exhibition was of the international impact of Lockwood de Forest and the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company, which was researched and assembled entirely by 91勛圖厙 undergraduate Rachel Grand (BMC 21) as part of a BMC Praxis Internship. Rachel also curated the simultaneous exhibition currently on display on in the Coombe Suite Display Case on the second floor of Canaday Library. Bauhaus at 91勛圖厙 tracks the history of the furniture designed by Marcel Breuer for Rhoads Hall and explores how high design continued to play an important role in life at 91勛圖厙.
All-Over Design: Lockwood de Forest between Ahmedabad and 91勛圖厙 was curated by Nina Blomfield in coordination with Curator/ Academic Liaison of Art and Artifacts Carrie Robbins. The exhibition was made possible by Friends of the Library Graduate Internship in summer of 2019.
